Orin Hardy On Eco-Friendly Bamboo And The Global Movement Towards Sustainable Construction Practices

Orin's passion is to connect and inspire people to be better humans both to create an ever advancing civilisation and to make planet earth a better place to be.

Orin lives in Bali where he grew up, surrounded by rivers and jungle, but has also lived in the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia. He received a liberal arts degree from The Evergreen State College in 2011 and has since gained significant experience in bamboo construction, permaculture design, teaching, and entrepreneurship.

Along with his team, he has welcomed hundreds of people from all over the world to participate in his Bamboo U programs.

He wants to bring more bamboo to more people to transform how humans live on the plant.

Orin discusses the shift from consumers using traditional construction materials in favour of eco-friendly alternatives and how he is sharing his knowledge of building with bamboo to empower communities utilise it to its full potential.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Sarah Ripper] - To start off, could you share a bit about your background and what has led you to where you are today?

[Orin Hardy] - I started the same place everybody starts; I was born in Toronto Canada. My parents are from Canada, but I was very quickly put on an airplane and brought to Bali in Indonesia, where I grew up. My parents had been here since 1975. I had the privilege and the honour of getting to grow up in a beautiful place. Then I went off to boarding school in the US, then in Australia, then in Canada. First, I was in upstate New York, then I was in Victoria way out in the bush. Finally, I was in Canada in Vancouver. I got to see a lot of the world before I even went to university, and I guess that shaped a lot of what I do. Eventually in 2012 after graduating from college in the United States, I came back to Bali and started first as a landscape and permaculture designer. Then I founded a farm with my wife Maria, which evolved by 2015 into building buildings out of bamboo. More specifically, I started teaching people from all over the world, how to build with bamboo and why we need to take this material seriously. The good news is, if we fast forward seven years or eight years later, people are taking the material very seriously compared to the way they were. But there's still a long way to go and I feel we're still in the early stages of adopting a largely overlooked material. Bamboo is a ubiquitous part of culture across the tropics (including here in Bali), and it is used in a lot of traditional applications but mainly for temporary purposes. It’s not necessarily seen as a viable option for people who want to build modern structures. In Bali, we've had the freedom to experiment with this material, learn how to treat it and how to design with it properly.

We've managed to build not just minor houses, but full-scale crazy mansion like buildings that I think defy our imagination and inspire us to understand the future of sustainability can be not just efficient and better for the planet, but also ultimately a gift for us. A lot of the time when people talk about making the world sustainable, they think about sacrifice. They think about all the things are going to have to give up and how terrible it might be. People think about what if they don't have air conditioning, or how walls made of concrete just feel safer.

But when we lean into it, we realise that although sacrifice is important and giving up all our stuff is also a good idea, bamboo lets us explore the creative potential of sustainable design in a way few other materials have pushed us to do.

That's not because the other materials are not good, it's just because bamboo has such a unique and exceptional character. It's hard to mute that character, no matter how you use it, it comes out in the buildings we create. That has pushed us to design in new ways and impacts the overall process of building, not just the outcome.

As the founder of Bamboo U, can you tell us more about your organisation, the educational offerings you have and the impact that's generating?

Bamboo U is part of a larger ecosystem of enterprises. My dad got excited about bamboo in the early 2000s and started building bamboo buildings. He started a school called the Green School, and then he and my sister headed a design firm called IBUKU. They also started a bamboo processing facility and factory which did a lot of treatment; that grew into creating a Green Village. We had a Green School, and they also have a hotel called Bambu Indah. Then, I started a farm and finally there's also Bamboo Pure, which is the professional construction business I also run now. All these things popped up as an ecosystem of enterprises my dad initiated, and they've all gone off in different directions and still exist.

I realised I wanted to focus on how we bring this information and this sense of inspiration and good energy to others, I don't know how else to put it. People often underestimate the importance of encouraging and inspiring people when it comes to learning new things.

I started Bamboo U with my wife Maria, and it grew out of my work in teaching different sustainability skills and permaculture workshops on our farm. It quickly evolved into Bamboo U, and we've welcomed over a thousand people to take our courses here in Bali and online with our 11-week immersion program. Our goal is to assist people in their goals, and what we've found is there is a growing movement of people who have the goal of building the right relationship with the land and in a way that feels like it's supporting or adding to the future rather than taking away from it. Everybody's interested, so how do we help them understand the ideas behind design all the way to construction? How do we approach bamboo building, take what we've done here and apply it in a new and creative way to their context? Obviously in different contexts, bamboo is going to be useful in different ways. The way we built here in Bali may not be appropriate or even legal in a place like Australia, but I also know there's a very healthy bamboo movement in a place like Australia. People are finding creative ways to solve building problems in a sustainable way using bamboo.

What are some examples of projects utilising bamboo and emerging possibilities you have identified in the bamboo architecture and sustainable design spaces?

There's the camp of people who say we have all these rules and regulations, and because we have those rules and regulations what we’re doing is not possible. Then there's another group of people who believe that clearly the rules and regulations must change, because what we're doing is clearly possible in practice. To date we've built over 150 buildings here in Bali, and then another thousand people have built other buildings. There are these two groups right, and of course the question becomes how do I do this where I am?

I always start this conversation by saying you need to find a foothold and way your community and cultural environment is going to accept what you do, and that it's going to be attractive to people.

For us here in Bali, building wild out of the box buildings was the first place to start to help shift people's perceptions. It's great to focus on bamboo as a low-income alternative to other materials like concrete or steel; there are some great organisations in places like The Philippines and South America doing this in effective ways. We feel it's important to start with shifting people's perspectives and perception. One way to do that is to help redefine or reimagine the aspirational or modern dream for a house. Right now, it's steel, concrete permanent, isolated and ‘elevated’ from nature, disconnected in the sense of being part of the natural world. How can we redefine that? Designing and creating unique and wild things is a good place to start, and so to answer your question, when people are looking at how do I do this in my context? I always say figure out some need or way to do it. In the West for example (places like Australia and Europe), there's a big movement of needing things like festival structures, so starting and in rural areas where there are less stringent codes might be a better idea than starting in cities. That's when performing creative round hole construction, one of the other structures we love to teach is the yurt. The yurt is a simple hyperbolic structure that is modular and efficient, but still round, creative and designed for a material like bamboo in its round form. Then you also have a whole other movement (which is also cool) of people who are figuring out how to create wooden or timber alternatives and bring bamboo into the mass timber movement. That seems to be the strongest foothold to get into places like urban environments where there are stringent regulations. The risk there is people neglect to question the overall regulatory environment where there's just more emphasis on litigation and insurance policies than building healthy places to live. This is places that are healthy for us, but also healthy for our environment. I don't believe it's appropriate to sacrifice the planet to make sure insurance companies are happy. That aside, it’s also important to look at things that are fire safe, one of the legitimate risks with round pole bamboo construction is fire. If you're in a tropical area like Bali, where you have so much humidity, building a round pole bamboo building isn't a problem because it's quite hard to light something on fire most of the time. If you're in a relatively suburban or rural context, round pole bamboo construction is also perfect. But if you go to a place where fire is a real problem, then you're going to have to find other ways to use it. The mass timber movement and using bamboo as a wood alternative is interesting, not just from a sustainability point of view. It’s limiting the number of trees we're cutting down by using fast-growing materials that have extremely strong fibres.

From the performance point of view, a lot of people don't realise engineered bamboo is often stronger and harder than hardwood. The big issue is cost; it's usually slightly more expensive, which means it's often just reserved for things like window frames, floors, and walls where there's a lot of impact or potential wear and tear. It is just stronger than softwoods, which is often the alternative to creating wooden buildings these days. That's exciting, and I see Europe and the US doing a lot of work there. Recently in the US the first bamboo building was made of engineered bamboo and approved for carbon credit, so that's exciting. I see two potential opportunities; one is in how we use round pole construction and questioning the stringency of regulatory environments and whether that's necessary in every case. The other is in how we create sophisticated engineered products. Regardless of what path you choose, at Bamboo U we're interested in helping people to redefine and understand how we build, while making sure we build the right relationships with our homes as every building is a true expression of who we are. It's an expression of our culture and an expression of what we believe. Right now, we're segregated, we live in a vast complex of quite boring buildings which I think has a bad psychological impact and needs to be addressed. If you enter certain buildings and were blindfolded, put in the elevator, and then let out on a different floor, you will have a very hard time knowing where you are because of monotonous design practices. It's hard to orient yourself in the way humans are used to orienting themselves.

There are so many different issues, but on a design and construction side, we see bamboo as a powerful way to help us reimagine how we want our human environments to be designed and built with community input again. This is rather than building and segregating ourselves from that whole process of construction.

Regardless of whether our students go off and build with bamboo or not, we hope they get that message, which is that natural, lightweight construction is possible. In every context, we must do the work and be willing to swim against the momentum of the modern building industry which pushes us towards concrete, steel, aluminium, and plastic. These are all great materials by the way, we're just using way too many of them.

Do you hope that as you build capacity for yourself and other people in the industry these opportunities will ripple out further?

We're seeing it happen already. We're seeing people who come to our programs now building with bamboo. The fun part is we like to teach the whole process of harvesting, treating, processing, and building with bamboo. We're seeing our courses are assisting our students in their goal to build with bamboo. We have alumni on every continent doing cool things, that's our main driver and focus right now. Everybody comes here and they say, "wow, this is really special, but we couldn't do this where we are." I think you can, and maybe you don't have to do exactly this, but maybe you can do something similar that helps solve problems in your area. One thing people don't realise is that if you came to Bali in the year 2000, there were no permanent bamboo structures on the island. They didn't exist, bamboo was used for temporary applications, buildings and for things like gazebos in a traditional way. But if you wanted to find a full-scale permanent bamboo structure, it was very hard to find. Because of the work we've been doing here, it is now a material a lot of people are using and understand has real potential.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently creating a positive social change?

There are many different inspiring projects, and some of those are happening on a larger or a smaller scale. Just with our alumni, I'm seeing some interesting projects start to pop up in places like Uganda, where they are in The Netherlands collaborating with universities and even having the government look at large scale urban projects. They're putting large canopies over major transportation hubs in the middle of the city down to much smaller projects where you're seeing people all over the world find bamboo in a place where bamboo doesn't have a solid supply chain and you can't buy it from the store or factory. They then treat bamboo themselves and build their own homes. You see this as being an important part of ecotourism, because it makes a lot of sense to build with bamboo in a place where it's hard to get a car because it's easy to carry, right? It's much easier than things like concrete and steel to carry. The Hilti Foundation is doing some incredible work in The Philippines, and The Base Bahay (Foundation) is an organisation bringing thousands of homes to low-income communities there. They're building everything with bamboo, engineering that bamboo and they're getting it to be officially certified. They have a whole lab in The Philippines where they're testing lots of different techniques to make sure those bamboo buildings are typhoon proof. The Philippines is the windiest place in the world, so they get more typhoons than anywhere else. If they're building out a bamboo successfully, and they're doing it for $5,000 a house, you then know there's something powerful about that. Beyond that, a project I'm inspired about (and full disclosure, I'm also invested in this) is ChopValue. Beyond just working on our round pole bamboo construction here, I have been expanding ChopValue into Indonesia. ChopValue started in Vancouver and they're upcycling chopsticks and turning them into furniture, surfaces and small products which gives these chopsticks a second life. If you think about a chopstick, most of them are harvested and made in China or Vietnam. Then, they're shipped all over the world, used for 30 minutes and thrown in the landfill. ChopValue has over 10 locations, they've upcycled over 100 million chopsticks in the last three years. Now they're looking to open over 100 locations, and they've already signed 60. Here in Indonesia, we're going to have 25 locations. Here we have chopsticks (and I didn't realise how many chopsticks were being used on the island), but we're also using satay skewers, which are a similar shape to chopsticks. We're pressing those in our micro factory and looking to open 25 micro factories in Indonesia. That's exciting because even with bamboo being such a sustainable material, even in my context, we're using a relatively small amount of bamboo in the grand scheme of things. We still had the capacity to tax the resource if we didn't plan properly, and even then, we're wasting a lot of bamboo. I’ve realised we need to find a way to waste less bamboo, so part of that became what if we collected more waste bamboo than we wasted? Then what if we had a way to take all the bamboo we're using and use every bit for its highest purpose to avoid having to dispose large quantities? ChopValue has been part of that process.

One thing people don't realise is the main barrier to entry, the reason there isn't more bamboo everywhere has less to do with its practicality in different contexts. It has much more to do with the fact the supply chain isn't very developed in a lot of places.

It has a very good domestic supply chain, where it's cut down in someone's backyard and turned into something in its context. But as far as helping solve things like climate change, helping lighten the load of our buildings so we have our buildings going from being net carbon emitters to net carbon sinks, that requires a type of industrialisation of bamboo that allows the supply chains to develop. The only place in the world which has a strong bamboo supply chain is China, and they're doing a great job sending that to the rest of the world. But there are also many other bamboo hotspots which have a similar capacity to do this. This includes places like Indonesia, where our bamboo is up to four times more productive than Chinese bamboo, but there isn't a coordinated way to get that from the farmers in the forest to factories sustainably. That's why I'm excited by models like Chop Value, where it's a distributed instead of centralised model.

To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?

I have some great books to recommend if you're interested in bamboo, one being Booming Bamboo by Pablo van der Lugt. That describes how we can use bamboo to transition to a more circular economy. Another more traditional book is Bamboo: The Gift of the Gods by Oscar Hidalgo (López). Those are two powerful books I recommend to anybody who's interested in bamboo. Of course, it's not technically a book, but if you're interested in learning more about bamboo, we have an 11-week course which teaches you everything from how to harvest it all the way to how to design and build with it. Naturally, given that I started this, I'm going to recommend that. Those books and resources are for anybody who wants to get involved in bamboo. If you're a little bit nerdier and into engineering, another recommendation is Frei Otto's work. Frei Otto wrote one book (IL31 Bambus – Bamboo) about bamboo and how to use it in structural systems, which I think has been influential.